Huawei, at its Developer Day in Cape Town on Thursday, revealed more about its budding ecosystem, growth in South Africa, and its AppGallery.
The AppGallery is effectively Huawei’s version of the Google Play Store, serving as an app respository for users. It’s pretty damn important too.
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As we’ve seen by the Huawei Mate 30 earlier this year, which launched without Google Services support, the AppGallery could soon become the only way to download apps to Huawei and Honor smartphones.
And that seems to be a firm focus for the company.
“Operating system is not the difficult part,” said Akhram Mohamed, Huawei CBG CTO for SA.
“On a consumer level, they don’t really engage on the OS level, but rather the app level.”
It noted that 350-billion apps have been downloaded by users from the AppGallery since its inception.
But which apps are the most popular in South Africa?
DStv Now is currently the biggest video app on AppGallery, seeing 72 000 downloads in the past two weeks.
Takealot is the top shopping app in South Africa, with a 20% monthly increase in downloads. It currently sits at 214 000 downloads.
News24’s app has been downloaded 52 000 times, the company added, while another video app called Viu has seen 100 000 downloads in a month.
“We are not forgetting about South Africa. South Africa is an incredibly important market for us,” Mohamed added.
This promise also comes after the company confirmed in May that more apps from local developers will be featured on the AppGallery in the future.
Huawei also shed light on its market share in South Africa at its Developer Day, which continues on Thursday.
Feature image: Andy Walker/Memeburn
